"You
get your freedom by letting your enemy know that you'll
do anything to get your freedom..... It's the only way you'll
get it." ­Malcolm X

"Hammer
and Rhino,"
Drawing By Robert Green

Introduction
to the Surrealist Issue of
RACE TRAITOR

This
special issue of Race Traitor focuses on a particular group
of race traitorsthe world's first Surrealist Group in 1920s
Paris, and its direct offshoot, the international (and multiracial)
surrealist movement. With an unbroken continuity from 1924 down
to the present day, the surrealist movement has helped develop not
only a revolutionary critique of whiteness but also new forms of
revolutionary action against it.

As
a historically constructed social formation, the notion of a "white
race" appears as ideology, mirage, hoax, con-game, racket, swindle:
an altogether malevolent piece of duplicity and horror. But for
those who buy it and sell it, whiteness is what Richard Wright once
called a powerful "psychological reality," a commodity fetishized
into a pattern of belief, custom, law'n'order. Millions of those
who are deceived into thinking they are white are unhappy about
it, but don't quite know how to divest themselves of this debilitating
delusion. How to quit being whitehow to release the
latent but repressed yearning to abandon the absurdity of whiteness
and to become truly human at lastis one of the burning questions
of the age.

For many Europeans and Americans of European descent, being surrealist
has been one way of not being whiteindeed, a way of actively
undermining the white mystique and of sabotaging the repressive
machinery that props it up. From the surrealist point of view, traditional
anti-racist strategieseducation against prejudice; support
for civil rights; boycotts; picket lines; etc.however important,
clearly are not enough. The fact that white privilege is
an inherently irrational phenomenon is proof that it cannot
be overcome by rational means alone. Nothing less than surrealist
revolution can abolish whiteness once and for all.

Surrealist
intervention in this domain has always emphasized the active imagination,
in keeping with

John
Brown

surrealism's fundamental aim: the realization of poetry in everyday
life. Of course it also involves revolutionary criticism, integral
subversion, aggressive humor, and direct action. In poetry as in
life, surrealism embodies the utmost fraternization and solidarity
across the color-line as well as relentless struggle against the
very existence of the color-line, and against all those who enforce
it or tolerate it.

As
we emphasized in our declaration on the Los Angeles Rebellion of
April-May 1992,* whiteness corrupts and derails every impulse toward
freedom, so that no solution can be found to any social problem
without solving the problem of whiteness. Everyone knows that white
supremacy is the single biggest obstacle to working class emancipation.
It is also the major stumbling-block in the way of women's equality,
for white supremacy is inherently androcentric. There are of course
female white supremacistsa large part of today's "women's
movement" is afflicted with this maladybut such women truly
are no more than cheerleaders of the white male power structure.
Can anyone doubt that overcoming whiteness is indispensable to women's
liberation?

Similarly,
it is no accident that the people most responsible for devastating
the Earth's wild places, poisoning the air and water, driving uncountable
species of animals and plants to extinction and otherwise wrecking
the planet, are those who think of themselves as white. Only when
humankind is free of the stifling burden of whiteness will we be
able to develop a non-exploitative, ecologically sound relationship
to the Earth and all its inhabitants. With rare exceptions, however,
the organizations that currently pass themselves off as the "environmental
movement" in this country are as devoted to white supremacy (and
to capitalism) as the giant corporations whose depredations they
pretend to oppose.

As
surrealists, we are especially interested in how the "white problem"
turns up in language, images, myth, symbols, popular culture, everyday
life, the whole field of human expression. However, our goal at
all times is to attack and abolish whiteness and its institutionsto
attack and abolish the whole social/political/economic/cultural
system that has made whiteness the hideous emblem of the
worst oppression the world has ever had to endure.

With
this presentation of the concrete experience of surrealists past
and present in the worldwide struggle against white supremacy, we
hope above all to provoke and inspire readers to develop their own
abolitionist imaginations in new directions, and more generally
to stimulate discussion and debate with all who uphold the motto
"Treason to Whiteness is Loyalty to Humanity."

THE
CHICAGO SURREALIST GROUP

Chicago,
April 1998

* The Chicago Surrealist Group, "Three Days That Shook the New World
Order: The Los Angeles Rebellion of 1992," Race Traitor No.
2 (Winter 1993), 1-17.